Despite pilot Roger Peterson being a “young married man who built his life around flying,” he had failed his instrument rating checkride nine months prior to the accident. He held a waiver to his second-class medical certificate for a hearing deficiency, although this almost certainly was not a factor in the accident. Most significantly, he had taken instrument training in an aircraft with a different type of attitude indicator than the one in the Bonanza. It provided a direct movement of the airplane on the face of the instrument, similar to today’s modern steam-gauge attitude indicators, but opposite that of the then more-prevalent war-surplus attitude indicators in which the airplane stayed constant in the instrument while the artificial horizon moved instead.
